Patrick Cantlay has responded to Brooks Koepka’s “brutally slow” assessment of his play following Sunday’s final round at the Masters.
Cantlay has been under siege since ambling around Augusta National on Sunday like a sloth, uniting an army on social media to call out his slow play.
Koepka, playing alongside eventual champ Jon Rahm in the group behind Cantlay, claimed the Spaniard could go for seven toilet breaks and still not lose pace with Cantlay out in front. However, Cantlay believes Koepka’s taking aim at the wrong guy, insisting his group was waiting on every shot much like everyone else.
“Yeah, I mean, we finished the first hole, and the group in front of us was on the second tee when we walked up to the second tee, and we waited all day on pretty much every shot,” Cantlay said. “We waited in 15 fairway, we waited in 18 fairway. I imagine it was slow for everyone.”
Viktor Hovland certainly looked to be losing patience with his playing partner on Sunday. While Cantlay may be right in suggesting he was waiting on most shots, Hovland had the double frustration of having to wait for Cantlay for his turn to come around.
Nicknamed Patty Ice, supposedly for his cool demeanour and not his glacial pace of play, Cantlay laboured even between putts, so much so that Hovland began pitching into greens while Cantlay was some one hundred yards back in the fairway.
Do you think Cantlay’s slow play should have been penalised? pic.twitter.com/VMicjCEXWI
— Peter Finch (@PeterFinchGolf) April 11, 2023
Pushed as to why fifty professionals struggled to get around Augusta in twosomes, admittedly in a two-tee start, Cantlay insisted that round times haven’t increased for the best part of twenty years, and he wasn’t about to predict an improvement given how much money is on the line from week to week.
“Yeah, one thing that’s interesting sitting on the PAC is you get all the numbers and the data, and rounds have taken about the same length of time for the last 10 or 20 years that they currently take,” he said.
“When you play a golf course like Augusta National where all the hole locations are on lots of slope and the greens are really fast, it’s just going to take longer and longer to hole out.
“I think that may have been what attributed to some of the slow play on Sunday, and then also when the wind is gusting and the wind is blowing maybe inconsistently, that’s when guys will take a long time, too. I think that’s just the nature of playing professional golf, where every shot matters so much.”
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